I don’t have any big adventures to share, but I figured an Icelandic Thanksgiving was worth a post – plus I have a bit of a tradition in chronicling our “Turkey Day” festivities. 🙂

Thanksgiving in Iceland is interesting, because there is no Thanksgiving in Iceland. That’s not to say they don’t have something of an equivalent, but insofar as Thanksgiving as we Murkans know it, on the date we know it, there is no such thing. Of course this isn’t my first time celebrating a U.S. holiday while abroad, and the nice thing about Thanksgiving is that in order to celebrate you really only need two things: the ability to give thanks and food. Neither of which are in short supply in Iceland.

Plus, if you associate Thanksgiving with chilly November air, then there’s definitely no shortage of that here. In fact things have been downright cold lately. There was a morning last week where I was walking to the gym around 6:55am that might have been the coldest I’ve felt in years. At that time of day (and for a few hours afterward) it’s still pitch black, and when combined with the wind it was pretty terrible. Yet we’ve adjusted more easily to the cold (being used to it and all) than we have the darkness – for instance with the cold you can always have a nice hot cup of tea!

Though I guess the increased darkness has also generated more aurora borealis viewing opportunities. We’ve seen some awesome light displays over the past several weeks. While we still haven’t taken the time to learn how to photograph them with our good camera, they were so strong a couple of weeks ago that even our cell phone cameras could capture them.

Due to our lackluster camera skills (and the fact my phone is horrible in low light conditions) those photos only capture about 30% of the total lights that were present, but hey, at least we actually captured something this time! The lights are more frequent and stronger during the late fall and winter period, so hopefully we’ll get better at capturing them. Speaking of which, it might not be winter yet but we’ve had snow for awhile now.

In fact the first round of snow moved into our area around October 11th (though it didn’t move into the city itself until November 9th), and we’ve had snow in some capacity since then. It makes for some pretty mornings though!

There’s always something nice about a freshly fallen snow.

The downside is that we don’t always have sunlight – in fact it’s usually cloudy. So when coupled with the fact that the sun comes up less and less, the snowy landscapes can often get very, very grey.

But the animal priends’ don’t mind.

Nor do the snowmen. Icelandic Snowmen that is.

By and large we’ve adjusted to it. Some days are definitely worse than others.

It was like this pretty much the entire day – notice the complete lack of Perlan in the distance.

But other days kind of a have a winter-wonderland type of whimsy to them.

Chuck and Chica’s house.

That of course brings me to the holidays. Despite the lack of Thanksgiving, Christmas is beginning to pop up around Reykjavík – for example, Christmas Trees.

And also wreaths, lots of wreaths.

Oh and in case you were wondering, yes that is Tjörnin – frozen enough that people are using the lake as a walkway.

The holidays have also crept into other areas, such as our milk cartons.

SB and I agreed that it tasted like those old-fashioned strawberry hard candies. You know the ones. Tristen also liked the manly Santa Claus on the can.

So, in order to prepare for the holidays we took care of a few things at the apartment. Namely cleaning some harder to clean areas. The plant buddies also got some new soil and new pots!

They’ve also since moved to the window sill in our bedroom to hopefully get a bit more of the limited sunlight we have. Another big event was bath time for the boys. Bath time is a huge ordeal. Valentino loves it, Tristen hates it, Pig just gets dirty again within 10 seconds, and Pigsten, well Pigsten is easy at least. Part of what makes it such an ordeal is that the boys take so long to try. Even with a fan it took us 10+ hours to dry them after I hand-washed them. So, lacking a fan, it took a whopping ~30 hours for them to fully dry.

Here they are shortly after getting cleaned in the sink – sitting on our bathroom stool/shelf/whatever (from the basement! 😀 ) in the early stages of drying. As you can tell Tristen was less than enthused. Here they are about 20 some hours later, much drier and enjoying a nice tea next to the radiator (with Pig doing yoga, of course).

The photo of the boys sitting next to the radiator in the bedroom reminded me – I had an interesting home improvement moment two weeks ago. It involved this:

That’s an array of networking and electrical outlets in our bedroom. The network ports don’t work, and haven’t since we moved in – so I’m not sure why they are there (the ones in the living room do work) but the electrical outlets work fine. The issue wasn’t anything to do with the ports/outlets themselves, but rather an extremely annoying noise that would occasionally come from the wall around/in the array. This noise had occurred shortly after we moved in and occurred on and off for a few days then stopped for awhile. However it started back up about two weeks ago and persisted, without fail, for nearly 48 hours (as in, it didn’t stop for a single moment).

The noise sounded like a muffled “knock” – so since the noise was coming from near a radiator I figured it might be pipes. However, after it kept me up half the night I decided the next day to investigate. I came to realize that the noise occurred exactly every 3 seconds (give or take -.002 seconds I suppose, if you want to be super accurate). I tested it 26 times using magical technology, and it was always 3 seconds. Having spent the past 3 years in a 90 year old Boston building I am used to pops, groans, and knocks – and they were never to precisely uniform on time. This knocked out the usual building-y stuff (and also our neighbors, who, while they bang around continuously, do so in an irregular manner).

Since I ‘sperg out over stuff like this and am super noise sensitive, the night of the second day I just got frustrated, grabbed the IKEA tool set and went about pulling the whole thing out of the wall. I was determined that the noise was coming from directly behind the array – and turns out I was right. After dismantling the whole shebang, I realized what was happening – and it was unlike anything I’ve experienced before.

Basically, within the array there are two holes on the network side that lead into the interior of the wall. These are used to run the Ethernet cables. However, cables are only ran on one side (and again they don’t work) so the other side is just an open little hard plastic tube/hole into the wall. This is where the noise was coming from. See, our apartment is very air tight (concrete + good window seals). If the windows are closed and you open the door, your ears pop (seriously). Similarly, if you open the windows in odd orders the pressure will sometimes close another window. And, best of all, if it’s really windy outside, sometimes it’s insanely difficult to open a window or door if it opens outwards (so all but out front door). I’m not kidding, one night I put my full 175lbs into our balcony door and it wouldn’t open (we also had severe winds, but the pressure also created suction). So, my theory as to what was happening is that this little hole in the networking side was acting as a pressure valve between the pressure in our apartment, and the pressure in the interior of the interior wall (which is drywall and studs, unlike the exterior walls, which are concrete).

This only occurred under certain atmospheric conditions (thus why it didn’t happen constantly) and the “knock” was in fact a little air/pressure bubble “bursting” in that tube as the pressure equalized and then was imbalanced again, over and over and over – thus the nearly perfect 3 second loop. How did I fix it? I shoved some puddy up in the whole and then slapped a piece of tape over it. 😀

No more noise, and it’s been silent ever since – and I need all the silence I can get in this place of parties and screaming until 4am.

ANYWAYS, got a bit off topic there. Back to Thanksgiving. Our Thanksgiving was actually the day after Thanksgiving, because that is what worked better for our schedule, plus when there is no formal holiday you can pick your own days. 😛

As if its needs saying, Thanksgiving = beer.

Props to SB and Tristen for carting this mother-load home!

Yes, after entirely running out of beer (even near-beer) we have since replenished the supply in the Taco household (complete with a bottle of wine too – from Argentina, we are cultured folks). Thanksgiving also = turkey, but we don’t have access to turkey, so we went with chicken, but we don’t need a big chicken, nor do we have space to even store one, so we went with a little chicken!

Yep, an official Icelandic chicken! For seasoning I had some of the usual stuff, garlic, pepper, onion, carrots, etc. But I also tried stuffing it with cheese and using a new (to us) sauce from the U.K. – HP Sauce. To me it kind of tasted like A1 sauced mixed with Worcestershire sauce, it was good.

We also had some MASSIVE Icelandic sweet taters.

The bird and the tatoes were coupled with snow peas (couldn’t find green beans), and rolls (which ended up having cheese inside – yay language surprises!) paired with some rhubarb jam!

Here’s a nice “before” photo of our Kjúklingur.

And then an “after” shot, complete with copious amounts of anxious Tristen.

In case you were wondering how snow peas worked out, they were really yummy.

Those are diced hotdogs (which are really good here), plus the usual seasonings. I was really pleased with how they came out. As for the massive sweet potatoes, we mashed those up and combined them with some Icelandic butter (amazing), Skyr (Icelandic yogurt – also amazing), and a small bit of honey. They were delicious – though I am biased as sweet potatoes are probably my favorite part of Thanksgiving these days.

Naturally no Thanksgiving is complete without desert! We don’t have a pie pan – and in fact pies don’t really seem to be a thing here (we seriously haven’t seen a single pie) so we opted for something a bit more unique, a chocolate-crunch layer cake!

All in all it was a wonderful little ole’ Thanksgiving in Iceland. Sure we have no chairs so we sat on budget kitchen chair cushions on the floor while eating off a coffee table we found in the basement, but the important thing is that we had good company, and the food was pretty dang good too. 🙂

What’s kind of funny is that the entire price of the meal – which we ate on for three days – was still less than it would be to eat out a single time here in Reykjavík, craziness! Heck, our bird was only ~664 ISK (~$6.46). We were smart shoppers and deal hunted, as usual!

But yes, despite the fact that our neighbors proceeded to keep me awake until 3:30 am that night with their stupidity, I am thankful for many things. Yes, though I do indeed complain nearly constantly on this blog, I am generally quite thankful (and tend to complain less in person, though not much ; ) ).

Here’s a few things I am thankful for:

SB, the boys, our plants, that I’ve probably secured a supervisor for my thesis, my health, beer, being brave enough to take chances, my persistence (read: stubbornness), my computer still working, my pillow, coffee, polar bears, squirrels, my human family, a few planned adventures (more on those later!), that my income-based repayment application got approved so I won’t literally go bankrupt within 5 months, Steam sales, my 2 human friends (that might sound kinda sad, but I have impossibly high friend standards), Chuck and Chica, Iceland’s housing stipend, Meem letting me do work for her, Oatly oat milk, puffins, getting to watch airplanes take off, Charles XII of Sweden, Carmex, ear plugs, my ability to do Crow (yoga), indoor plumbing, my 7 year old backpack from Wal-Mart that has held up better than most designer backpacks would, my 7 year old Wal-mart folders which are rugged but still kicking, my passion for history, the person online who taught me how to open a beer using a quarter without bending the bottle cap, my S5 phone still working, my laptop still working, echinacea goldenseal, squeegees, sunglasses, Bónus, guerrilla tape, Iceland’s awesome tap water, Thomas IV, that my headset still works, my 11 year old slippers, soft-close cabinet hinges, my $3 mixing bowl, people who throw away things that I can take, and lastly, SB and I’s mutual desire to explore the world.

And those are just the things from the top of my head. 🙂

I hope you all had an enjoyable Thanksgiving, whether it was an “official holiday” or a “l337 underground T-Givn’ holiday” abroad.

Well, Thanksgiving has now come and gone, which means per the advertisers it’s now officially Christmas. Bah, who am I kidding, it’s been Christmas since October. But, here on Dinosaur Bear Christmas is still a far away thing, as I don’t move at advertiser speeds. Instead of just skipping over Thanksgiving (and Halloween) as if it didn’t happen, I’m going to revisit some recent events as a way of giving thanks for them.

For starters, things have been busy on the law school front, though they always are.

Pigsten serves as a good visualization of being a busy little bee dinosaur.

But, I am thankful that there are things like beer to get me through the crazy busy times!

I love this huggie.

Plus, while things have been especially crazy with my RA position, the good news is that I 1) get paid for it and 2) was able to get just enough ahead of things to not have to do any schoolwork on either Thanksgiving or Friday (technically I should have done stuff on Saturday, but I didn’t, but that’s our secret). I’ve also started the bar exam application process which is a little crazy, but I’m thankful that so far things are going well with that (I’ll probably do a whole post on that at some point).

I’m also thankful for some recent events here at the Taco household. For starters, Pig and SB’s yoga program is almost complete (they graduate next week! – though Pig is about 600 hours ahead of SB).

Pig and Valentino doing some early morning yoga.

Valentino isn’t formally in the program, but he gets he fair share of yoga with Pig – when Pig isn’t busy “grubbing” that is.

In addition to some yoga, we’ve also had a bit of a sports-streak lately. Namely we saw both a hockey match and a football game within a 24 hour period, which is probably the first time in my life I’ve attended two sporting events so closely together.

The first was a fabled hockey match-up between Harvard and Boston College. Despite our best efforts, SB and I had never seen Harvard and BC face off in anything. We’d wanted too since we’d moved out here, but between schedule conflicts and cost (the Beanpot Tournament is expensive) we’d never been able to. Well, fate had something in store for us via a random e-mail from Harvard Athletics. We already had plans to go see a Harvard football game on Saturday (and had had the tickets since like June) but on Tuesday evening I got an email with the subject line of “No Plans For Friday Night?” which then offered a discount on Harvard hockey tickets (which area already not that expensive, really most of Harvard’s sports tickets aren’t) – the opponent? None other than Boston College.

After about 10 minutes of debate we decided to to it, a 7:00pm hockey game, followed by a 12:30pm football game the next day. Sport on.

Because we got our tickets so late, and really because BC’s hockey team is quite popular, we ended up sitting right behind the Harvard player’s box.

We were worried that we wouldn’t be able to see much, but to be honest it wasn’t that bad except for when the coaches stood on the bench. One of the coaches gave SB some gum though, so that sort of made up for it. 🙂

Speaking of coaches, the BC coach had an EYE-PATCH.

My phone’s zoom is terrible, but the eye-patch dude shouldn’t be hard to pick out.

If you weren’t aware, eye-patches grant magical powers, so I figured Harvard was doomed, and sure enough BC scored first – a fact that was made easier to deal with thanks to some Dipping Dots, the first time I’d had them in probably over a decade!

While the start of the game was pretty tight, things took a surprising turn as we got deep into the second period. Harvard was ranked 11th, while BC was 3rd, so Harvard was definitely the underdog – plus BC was on a winning streak. Well, something just clicked for Harvard and did not click for BC and at one point Harvard scored three goals in the course of like 1.5 minutes – a crap ton for hockey. While BC went on to score another goal, Harvard did too, and that’s how the game ended, Harvard 5, Boston College 2.

The curse was ended, for at least one of us. 😀

Now, the universe likes to balance things out – give and take so to speak, so the next day Harvard proceeded to lose to Yale in “The Game” – ending it’s 9 year victory streak. In case you weren’t aware, one of the oldest college football rivalries in the US is not any of the schools you probably think. In fact it’s none other than Harvard and Yale, football teams which largely seem to not exist outside of New England (in part due to some rules that force teams to favor academics over bowl schedules). “The Game” dates to 1875 and this year was the 133rd playing (certain years weren’t played due to WWI and WWII). Overall Yale leads 66–59–8, though until this year Harvard had won 9 straight games. Go figure that the game SB and I were able to attend was the one they’d lose.

In fact, on the whole my “The Game” experience wasn’t that great – and lest you think it’s just me being a sore loser, note that I still enjoyed last year’s game versus Penn where Harvard lost. The first issue was the cost. It cost $75 per person for “The Game” which while not outlandish in the realm of college football, is really fucking expensive for Harvard. So SB and I laid down $150 for the event. However, the cost wasn’t what really annoyed me, it was the people who ENDLESSLY walked in front of me. While I really like Harvard’s Colosseum I learned a couple of valuable lessons. 1) Good seats on a “normal” game (e.g. not packed) are not good seats for “The Game” and thus 2) don’t sit right next to an entry/exit row. While our other games here (which had like 1/20th capacity) had been fine, “The Game” is actually “over” capacity due to the fact they build extra seating for it – which also gets filled. The result was that what I thought would be good seats resulted in me not being able to see a solid 1/3 of plays, and then of those I could see, at least 75% were partially obstructed by one person or another. It got really, really old. For some reason people didn’t seem to realize that when they stopped to watch the game on the stairs, that they blocked 10-15 people’s view if the players were in the right spot on the field. I was not pleased, at all. So I paid $150 to really only see about %40 of a game of football. Plus – per SB who was our brave concession stand warrior – they were doing a HORRIBLE job of managing the crowds and food supplies, it took SB like 40 minutes just to get us food.

But, to stop whining and be thankful, it was a MARVELOUS day weather wise. Due to my Reynauds SB and I were concerned I was going to die, but it wasn’t an issue at all. Plus, the always weird (see here and here) Harvard marching band had this entire halftime show about about a giant Yale monster and some Harvard robot… and people running around with spatulas.. and yeah I have no idea.

The shinning moment of The Game was when a bunch of Yale students got naked and then got tossed around like rag-dolls by the cops (who they were intelligent enough to mock, because mocking the police has no consequences) and removed.

I post this here for perpetuity, for this is Yale.

Naturally, NO ONE blocked my view for that part, go figure. 😀

In another “not-the-brightest” moment, after their win (21-14) the Yale fans rushed the field, which I can understand after losing for nearly a decade. But what was great is that some of the Yallies didn’t seem to understand just how big of a drop it is from the stands to the field, so there were more than a few who were rolling around in agony after spraining (or worse) their ankles in the fall. It was kind of funny, but then again I’m kind of an asshole.

However, what I am even more thankful for than any of the above was the safe return of Tristen from California!

Look at that “manries” box, just look at it.

Yes, on October 19th Tristen went off on a “manries” spirit quest to the West coast (oddly very similar to Stephen King book I’m currently reading called “The Talisman“). He was gone until November 22nd (and thus missed a bunch of stuff, which he will hold over our heads for eternity). Why was he gone? Well, as mentioned, he was off at a special dinosaur hospital getting some of his “epic manries” battle wounds from countless adventures over the past four years. SB and I had been considering this for awhile and had determined that once we got back from both our Alaska Trip and our New England Trip that we’d send him off for some mending.

He was gone over a month, and while we had updates from his Doctor we were pretty nervous. Stuffing your child into a box a mailing them across the country is not an easy feat – and in many cases is illegal (sadly, think how cheap travel would be otherwise).

But Tristen being Tristen he did just fine. He has many stories of his “manries” endeavors in California – which range from lifting weights on the beach with The Beast, to joining a gang. As with most things, we’ll never know how many of these stories are true.

What we do know is that Tristen likes his schedule, not anyone else’s. So when Tristen arrived home a full day earlier than expected we shouldn’t have been surprised. As a result I had to run (literally run) home from school (screwing my shins all to heck in the process thanks to my backpack) to get him inside the apartment. There are, from time to time, packages stolen (or destroyed) from our building so we didn’t want Tristen sitting down there for long (lest he eat some thief). In total he maybe sat for there for all of 15 minutes. It was pretty obvious which box was Tristen’s, it was covered in all sorts of manliness.

Dragon #1.

A Triceratops.

A Brontosaurus (and a smaller horned dinosaur I am too pleb to recognize).

Dragon #2.

Yes, two dragons and three dinosaurs all on one box – very Tristen.

Before I even got him out of the box I could hear him saying “Res” over and over. He was happy to be home, and his brothers were happy to have him back!

I had essentially no time with them, other than getting Tristen out of his box, because I had to run back to school and ended up only being 5 minutes late to class. Later Tristen got to add a California stamp to his passport, making him the only one of us to spend any time in California outside of an airport!

So I was thankful that his hospital trip went well, and am thankful to have him back!

Layla technically lives with SB at her work, but she’s still a de facto member of our plant family. Speaking of which, while October has come and gone, the yearly conquest of the Thomas goes strong. In fact they recently claimed one of the Asian studies buildings on campus.

You laugh now, but when the pumpkins rise they’ll kill me last.

Another thing I’m thankful for is our weekly (or more recently, biweekly) family coffee dates. Last Wednesday was our first one with Tristen back, so we had cookies (and a cake-pop!) in addition to our coffee.

The story behind the cookie is one that Tristen loves to tell. Before he left for the hospital SB promised she would get him a cookie and a coffee. Well, on the day he was due to depart SB got him coffee, but forgot to get him a cookie. Poor little guy was a little heartbroken. Well, when he got back, he immediately started using cookie leverage, so SB not only got him a cookie, but also a cake pop. He seemed satisfied with the tithe.

In fact this Thanksgiving started a bit uneventfully. SB had to work on Thanksgiving, but fortunately wasn’t on a late shift. So early in the morning SB took off while the boys and I stayed home. Our Thanksgiving preparations didn’t even really begin until after most people had probably already eaten. One thing that was really funny was that this was Pigsten’s first time seeing the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Pigsten is still a hatchling, and thus he LOVES colors (and organizing and digging), so he was AMAZED by the parade. He even moved his beloved box over next to Philip (our TV) to watch. When the Sinclair float came on he (and Tristen) about lost his shit.

The boys have a history with Sinclair, and in fact it’s probably most definitely my favorite gas station chain on Earth. Meem told me some people get Sinclair’s credit card just to have a dinosaur on their credit card, if I ever live near them I am totally going to do that, not even joking.

After the parade, and around the time most of Murka’ was slipping into a food coma, the boys and I started our meal preparations. All in all I’d spend nearly 4 hours in the kitchen, but since SB was doing her family part by working, the boys and I did our part by doing the lion’s share of the Thanksgiving prep.

First thing was naturally our “ricken” which came in at 5lbs – a good size for us. This year I make the “ricken” with pear, lemon, onion, spices, olive oil, and this awesome-for-cooking offering from Tröegs:

It was STRONG, I’m talking 11% ABV strong and with both honey and cherries in the brew I had to fight a certain little polar bear constantly to keep out of it. But it really worked wonders on our “ricken.”

After a lot of cooking, and a lot of catching sneaky boys trying to eat said cooking, SB made it home and completed our spread by throwing together a side salad so we could pretend to be healthy.

To celebrate Tristen making it back in time for Thanksgiving we even make our Cool Whip green on the pie!

We still have leftovers from the glorious feast. Part of that stems from the fact that the next day we went out with a couple of SB’s friends for a mini-friendsgiving at The Red House, a place down in the square that we had never been to before. It was a fun (even for anti-social ole’ me). We also had some of Stumptown’s Winter Cheer coffee, which is kind of a mini-tradition in and of itself for us.

Valentino really, really likes his coffee.

Naturally we didn’t just celebrate Thanksgiving with coffee, food, and friends – we also had beer – special Thanksgiving beer no less!

Two glasses, same bottle. I really need to work on my pour consistency. Usually I’m pretty good (I was taught in Denmark, literally) but I guess I haven’t been drinking enough lately. Good excuse to drink more if I do say so myself. 😀

So yes, though I moan and groan and complain pretty much incessantly on this blog, I am thankful for many things. I am thankful for SB, for the boys, for getting to talk to both Meem and my Dad around Thanksgiving, and for not having to do schoolwork for three straight days. December, at least until Christmas/New Years, is going to be pretty dang stressful for me due to a lot of different variables. But, for now, I am thankful that I had a nice little “oasis” week with my family, both near and far.

I only have a about one more week of regular classes left, which then leads into exam/paper/frantic-RA-work territory, so next post will probably focus on that lovely transition as well as a few other things that are going on. But for now, I hope you had a Happy Thanksgiving! And remember, be a Scrooge like me, keep Christmas to 12 days. 😛

I’ve been quite behind on the ole’ blog lately, but as I’ve mentioned before, blogging is an “ebb and flow”sort of deal for me, and I’ve most definitely been in an “ebb” period lately. A lot of it has to do with just how busy I’ve been, but I think I also like pulling back from my week-to-week blog schedule from time to time. The nice thing about a blog is that it’s always there.

So, if it wasn’t obvious by the title of this post, there is going to be a lot of beer featured here. In fact, I’ve had so much beer since the last post that I think I can happily call this a period of “Beersgiving.” So, without further ado, lets see what I’ve had. Due to the sheer number of beers, I’m going to keep my comments brief, but as always I will link to the Beer Advocate page if you are especially interested.

Samuel Adams Winter Classics Pack – Boston Beer CompanyBeers 1-6 are all Samuel Adams, this was a GREAT pack, I love the 2-2-2-2-2-2 twelve packs the most.

A gift from Aunt Train (along with some Harpoon). Stone is widely regarded as being among the best IPAs (up with Dogfish Head). I’ve been wanting to try it for awhile. The wait was worth it. Lots of subtle flavors and a crisp but strong profile that would make this a good beer on both cold and hot days.

While neither of these brews were new to us, they are both varieties that we like. Whale’s Tale is a solid pale ale, with a blend of New England malts that give it is distinctive characteristics. Allagash White (one of SB’s new favorites) is a twist on a traditional Belgian Wheat, in that it also has coriander and Curacao orange peel in the wort itself.

If there was one word I would use to describe Dorado, it would be strong (in italics). Clocking in at 90 IBUs and 10% ABV, this Double IPA seems to ride the line between Tripel [sic] and Double. It was good, but phew, it was intense (but nowhere near 120 Minute intense). Gave me heartburn like holy hell – I’m actually going to the doctor about my heartburn this week.

The second of the fabled Dogfish Head “Ancient Ales” I’ve had (my first being Midas Touch back in Denver). Kvasir was developed with the help of chemical, botanical and pollen evidence taken from a 3,500‐year‐old Danish drinking vessel. The vessel, made of birch bark, was found in the tomb of a leather‐clad woman Dr. Pat says was probably an upper-class dancer or priestess. The analysis pointed to the ingredients used in this unique brew: wheat, lingonberries, cranberries, myrica gale, yarrow, honey and birch syrup. Both SB and I’s reaction was that it was VERY cranberry-y. I actually liked this more than Midas Touch, which was bit too much like wine (though I still liked it). However, the big bottle and 10% ABV make Kvasir a Dane to watch out for.

SB and I had another 10$ coupon for UNO, so we went there for the second time. The food was good, but the service was pretty meh (aside from our waitress, she was ok, but everything else was pretty much a fail, including waiting 50 minutes for salads). Anyways, we decided to get beers. SB went with Harpoon IPA, which is always a solid IPA choice and is kind of staple, since, you know, Harpoon is brewed here. I went for a bit of nostalgia and chose the Killian’s, namely because it was on sale for 3.75$ for 20oz, not bad by any stretch. I used to love this beer, like 8 years ago. Now it just tastes like an entirely average red ale. Not bad, but not noteworthy either.

Geary’s is another (new to me) brewery. However, they aren’t new for the area. This Maine-based brewery has been around since 1986 [I also saw 1983] and claims to be the oldest microbrewery east of the Rocky Mountains that has continuously operated. I have my doubts about that, but still 86 (or 83) is still fairly old for a microbrewery in Murka. HSA, or Hampshire Special Ale, is their flagship brew and based on Beer Advocate’s rankings you’d think it would be a godsend. However, my first impression wasn’t that great. Though to be fair I’ve only had one beer, maybe it will grow on me tonight when I go for beers 2 and 3 of the six pack. It wasn’t bad, its just not one of those beers I’d get again, but again, maybe that will change. [Edit: Nope, I’ve now had more than one and it’s still not really clicking with me.]

—

Phew, 16 beers! That has to be a Dinosaur Bear record. Maybe I am an alcoholic. I’d never know in law school. We’re all mad here.

Anyways, as the turkey cupcake above highlighted, Thanksgiving has come and gone! Last year SB and I did the solo thing. We were planning on doing that again this year, but things tend to change, this time for the better! My Dad and Grandma drove out from Midwest Texas and stayed with Aunt Train up in Lowell. So, SB and I went up there for a few days to celebrate. The boys of course came with us.

It was Pig’s first time on a train, so he liked that. While visiting we got to sleep in the laundry room, which was actually pretty nice. Aunt Train has a super comfy air mattress that doesn’t deflate over night, I didn’t know men could build such things (if you get that reference then you are my BFF). The family visit was a lot of fun and a nice “get-away” from law school. We had good conservations and good Thanksgiving food. I got to help make some of it, so all-in-all it was a good holiday. We also headed out to Concord for a highly abridged version of our previous trip, which was fun. Everyone even came down to ole’ Boston for a day trip. The weather kind of sucked, but we still had a lot of fun. We sort of traversed around Boston in a trolley (complete with plastic rain windows which allowed you to take in a glorious view of nothing) as well as on foot. We then had lunch at Legal Seafood, which is SUPER good, yet SB and I can never go there because Obama.

Tasty New England Clam Chowder. Everyone was in agreement that New England Clam Chowder is vastly superior to Manhattan Clam Chowder.

It was a great lunch, and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and the break from the rain and cold. One cool thing is that this was the exact same place that Meem, SB, and I ate at way back when we were scoping out law schools. So now we’ve got to eat there twice!

All in all it was great mini-break, even if it did cause me to get dangerously behind on some of my work. All the good good food, drinks, and company were worth it though! 🙂

Aside from school work and the holiday festivities, things have been fairly normal around the casa. The boys (especially Tristen) have been on a Mad Max kick.

Res. Rinky-Ri!

And football is always a thing. We especially like that the Patriots lost a game. Perfect season forever destroyed. Rexy.

As for the upcoming winter, I’m actually more prepared this year! See, its kind of funny. I went through 110.6″ of snow with no boots. Yep. You read that correctly. 110.6″ of snow, 50+ mph winds, and temperatures in the teens, all with regular ole shoes. Why? Because I’m stubborn and also Obama. It’s important to remember that I have Raynaud’s too. So not only was that stupid, it was also dangerous (never mind the fact that literally had a toe start to die back in 2013). HOWEVER, not to be stupid two years in a row, I decided to purchase a good pair of boots during this year’s Cyber Monday.

Oddly enough, I didn’t go with L.L. Bean (which owns New England), but instead with Columbia (which owns the Pacific Northwest). I’m just a rebel like that. Either way, these are some serious boots, and were still 85$ on sale. So now I’m a bit more prepared from the coming winter. Which of course means it won’t snow at all. Of course I also just shaved my beard (literally right before writing this post) and had SB cut my hair, so who knows whether or not there will actually be a net gain to my warmth. (I had my beard for 36 days this year, a new record)

While law school has been incredibly busy, I’ve also been getting fed a lot. I’ll attach couple of pictures here for SB to enjoy.

Of course we had some pretty yummy salads at UNO too, despite them taking 6 years to arrive.

It’s a good time of year to eat large salads, and large anything, and drink large beers. The squirrels near the law school have the right idea. They’ve been getting super fat. They are also super organized.

See the sticks and nuts and shells on the picnic table? The squirrels did that. No, seriously. The squirrels organized that stuff into little piles. There are also at least 4 squirrels in the photo above, if you want to play Where’s Squirreldo.

Not squirrel related, but Santa Claus appears to bee chilling at Pooh’s house here on campus.

If you are curious about why Winnie the Pooh lives at Harvard, which who wouldn’t be, then you need to read This and This and This and Watch This. This is one of the reason’s Harvard is so awesome. The “Pooh Club” goes back to at least 1946.

Another fun thing, a cop and some rollerbladers were racing around the old yard the other day.

And by racing I mean actually racing.

It was pretty funny.

But alas, this time of semester can’t all be fun. I’ve been stupidly busy wrapping up my journal stuff (having already contributed far more hours than I signed on to do). My clinic has also extended further than it should have, and there is nothing I can do but grin and bear it. There are also papers to write and exams to take. I also had a mad dash to finding housing in New Mexico for January. That was stressful, but the good news is that I will be working for the New Mexico Attorney General in January. The hiring process was kind of ridiculous, I had to put in more effort for three-week unpaid internship than I did any other job in my life. However, I’m looking forward to it.

But still, I’m fairly stressed right now. However, I’m actually in the process of cutting out some extraneous stuff from my life right now, which hopefully will pay off in the form of some added free time and reduced stress later. But I won’t begin to reap the benefits of that until really February, sadly. Then the real dividends should be 3L, but that’s over 1/2 a year away.

For now, I think I’ll wrap things up, I have a clinic report I need to get back to work on.

Happy Beersgiving!

Until next time,
-Taco

P.S. – A candid shot of the Boys and the squirrel buddies (Nutty, Nuts, and Nutsie) conspiring against SB in some manner or another – likely a result of Tristen.

..well, not “technically” the first Thanksgiving. That was in 1621.. or sometime around in there, no one really knows. However this was SB and I’s first Thanksgiving by ourselves. Sure, we’ve lived away from “home” for awhile now, but we always managed to make it back to visit with the famiru. But now that we are 1 million miles away, that is not really an option. So what better a way to start your own Thanksgiving traditions! We decided to do just that. I wouldn’t say our traditions were especially original though as they involved: Lots of food, a big dead bird, football, and beer. Of course its more about the experience than the details and thus we had an awesome “First” Thanksgiving.

We actually started planning our meal a good while back. Remember Savenor’s? We knew for awhile that we were going to get a chickum from there. We opted out of the turkey simply because turkeys tend to be huge and we did not need 15lbs+ of animal flesh. We ended up going with a 3.74lb chickum from a local farm, it was amazing. We also picked up some knockwurst while we where there. Sure its floor-sweepings, but it was local floor sweepings.

The rest of our goods came from either Wholefoods or Peapod. The nice thing about Peapod is that the day before Thanksgiving it was sleeting, yet SB and I were brought 192$ worth of groceries right to our front door. Win.

So what were we working with? Well, the photo below shows the “before” – which is all the ingredients we planned to use that day (Tristen & Valentino not included)

I’m not going to list everything, if you have questions just ask!

We actually got started right before the first football game of the day (there were three) so we had to prepare the snack plate to provide fuel to cook the other food.

Pepperjack cheese, summer sausage, knockwurst (cooked with magical secret ingredients), and these AMAZING pumpkin-flax-raisin-lots-of-stuff crackers from whole foods. It was an awesome snack plate. As you can see there was a lot of it, we are still snacking over 24 hours later.

The Cowboys were playing later in the afternoon (4:30) and Meem and Daryl 1 were actually attending the game, so we were wanting to get things done in time for that. Things went fairly smoothly over all: we got the pumpkin cleaned (though sadly we burned the seeds when baking them, but they still ended up moderately tasty) then chopped up and baking, sweet potatoes cleaned and baking, chicken nice and seasoned, etc. However, for whatever reason our sweet potatoes decided to take 17 years to cook. That pushed things around a bit but we ended up adjusting for it. Our sweet potato casserole ended up pretty awesome!

When it was all said and done, we actually ended up finishing all the preparations just in time to eat and then watch the Cowboys game! (They lost, but still)

It was an awesome dinner! Everything turned out really well. Some of it didn’t end up looking like we might have anticipated (rolls) but the flavors were excellent all around! The chickum was especially nomz.

After dinner had set for a bit, I got started on our pumpkin-spice-pecan pie. Yes, pumpkin, spice, and pecan. I was actually winging the recipe for the most part, so I was worried there was too much spice and not enough other stuff. However, it actually turned out really good and was quite hearty for a pie, without being sickeningly sweet.

We were so anxious to eat it that I didn’t take a photo in time, haha. After the pie it was big cleanup time, but we tag-teamed it fairly well and before too long the kitchen was looking better than it had in some time. Of course, the winding down time also meant that it was time to bust out the beer. I had planned on starting the beer earlier in the day, but a fat belly and a lot of cooking postponed that. It was worth the wait though, since it was a holiday I decided to treat myself to some decent beer. Particularly some Harpoon. If you remember the last Harpoon sampler pack I went with, I loved it. Since the weather has gotten colder outside, I went with the aptly titled “Snowed in Collection”

For starters, I’ve already mentioned the IPA, it was good, one of the better IPAs in my opinion. I’ve also already mentioned the UFO White. So I’m going to focus on the Winter Warmer and the Gingerland UFO. To be honest, it was the Gingerland that immediately drew me to this pack, but I’ll start with the Winter Warmer. This is a very interesting Winter Warmer. Warmers are generally over 6% ABV, however this one clocks in at only 5.5%, so its a bit on the lower end of things. Warmers are made to well.. warm. So they beef up the stoutness and the alcohol to make you nice and toasty when its all but toasty outside. This Warmer is an entirely different take on the variety. It gives up the stoutness for a more mild, almost lager-like flavor. It shuns the high ABV for lots of spices. I mean, sure, lots of Warmers claim to be spiced, but this one is like a spice explosion in your mouth. You’ll notice that Beer Advocate hates this beer. I’m going to raise my pinky and kick Beer Advocate in the balls on this one. This is an awesometake on a traditional winter warmer. If you go in expecting some middle of the road no frills warmer like Sam Adam’s (which isn’t bad, but its not unique either) then you’ll probably not like it. But I thought it was really cool, it was more of a spiced beer than a standard warmer. Next up was the Gingerland. Now, if you are not me, the idea of a “Gingerbread Inspired” beer probably leaves you iffy at best. But you’re not me (unless you are, hi me). I was enthralled by the concept. Sadly, it didn’t live up to its potential in my book. Its like they placed too much emphasis on the ginger and not enough emphasis on the bread. Now, for the ginger portion they nailed it. But I don’t think its fair to say “Gingerbread Inspired” then have no real hints of gingerbread at all. That being said, it was a good, interesting beer. Had they just called it “Ginger Beer” I’d be like “all hellz yiss dis is sum gud beerz” but since they said “Gingerbread” I have to hang my head a bit.

Despite the Gingerbread UFO not living up to my extraordinarily high expectations, I’d say that once again, this is a VERY solid sampler pack. I think Harpoon Brewery may well be on its way to becoming my favorite brewery. And no, they have not paid me to say that, though I’d be happy to talk endorsements.

The next day was Black Friday. I don’t do Black Friday, at least not in the traditional “Lets kill each other the day after being thankful” sort of way. I generally don’t even go out, at all. This year we did got out for a bit though, but only down to the square, I’m not a fan of malls on the best of days. We started with some lunch (we decided to skip our Friday night out in favor of leftovers) at a place called Flat Patties. SB actually found it. When we got there we found that they had “combined” with a place called Felipe’s Taqueria. Felipe’s is usually a few doors up, but their location was under construction so I guess they decided to be bestest-frandz with Patties and live in the same tiny restaurant. We came for sammiches, so we didn’t go with Felipe’s (and Mexican the day after Thanksgiving would cause me to poo out my intestines). I managed to find us a table upstairs, which was fortunate since it was quite packed. Not only was it Black Friday, but it was also two restaurants with the size of only one, which is not much anyways in Cambridge. SB went with a fish sandwich and I went with a chicken salad.

It was pretty good, nothing super stand-out, but the day after Thanksgiving food has kind of lost its luster. After we finished eating we did some shopping before heading to Starbucks to take advantage of a coupon SB had (she tried the new Chesnut Praline Latte and I went with my classic Peppermint Mocha). We started home then remembered we were wanting to get some Reddi-wip for our pie. Tristen also had an odd desire to spray it up his nose. We ended up finding some at CVS of all places and then we were on our way.

Once we were home I started on my own Christmas lists, completing all three of them in one sitting (score me). Now we’re just chilling for the rest of the evening, oh and of course eating leftovers, lots of leftovers.